A Cure for Cheating: Learning For Learning’s Sake

Cheating is a pernicious problem that most teachers deal with at some point. In her research, Stanford senior lecturer Denise Pope found that out of thousands of juniors and seniors surveyed only five percent did not cheat. It’s hard for teachers to catch cheating, but when they do trust is broken, students are penalized and no one ends up happy. In her Atlantic article, Jessica Lahey explains how she has begun to shoulder some of the blame when her students cheat and describes how creating a culture of learning based on mastery instead of test scores helps solve the problem.

“My teaching methods and classroom habits are often as much to blame as their response to them,” writes Lahey. “If my teaching practices create an atmosphere in which students resort to cheating rather than rely on their own hard work and discovery, I’m doing something wrong.”

A Classroom Where No One CheatsWhen I catalog my personal top ten list of teaching failures, the first spot always goes to the same offense: cheating. The times I’ve caught the eye of a student whose glance has wandered on to a classmate’s test. When I’ve compared two identical, oddly misspelled answers two different quizzes.

I am convinced there is definitely a strong purpose for testing and learning from that test. Mastery Level Learning is a key to making test, retest and retest a valuable tool in learning. With regards to cheating when is it learning and when is it cheating? I agree with Denise …………it is cheating when you the teacher set it up.

NLP training

Definitely! Education must be for learning rather than just scoring marks.

In Montessori education, there’s no cheating. Why? Because children love the challenge, and are not graded or compared. In my daughter’s Montessori elementary program, the children have math problem cards where the front side has the problem (e.g., 9,756 minus 2,874), and the back side has the answer. The children love the challenge of using the Montessori materials or paper-and-pencil to figure out the answer, and then self-check and self-correct.

Summer break presents the perfect opportunity for students to dig into games and build skills that’ll reap huge rewards when they return in the fall. Game making can be one of the best ways to get students thinking creatively while cultivating useful technical literacies, and there’s a ton of absorbing tools that students won’t tire of over the long break. Here are three options to choose from depending on the type of technology students have at home.

For educators who are interested in using games for learning — specifically towards developing skills as they relate to the Common Core State Standards — here are five games students can enjoy and that we’ve found sync with standards.

The success and popularity of Minecraft in and out of classrooms is no surprise. It’s one of the best examples of the potential of learning with games because it embraces exploration, discovery, creation, collaboration, and problem-solving while allowing teachers to shepherd play toward any subject area. But Minecraft is not the only game of this kind. Take a look at some of these.